Monday 27 August 2012
Sunday 26 August 2012
Thursday 23 August 2012
Wednesday 22 August 2012
Wiel Arets, Kristin Feireiss, Robert A.M. Stern, Benedetta Tagliabue, Alan Yentob
07 | 04 | 2012
the President of the Jury will be nominated by its members at the first meeting
The International Jury of the 13th International Architecture Exhibition (Venice, Giardini and Arsenale, August 29th – November 25th 2012) has been appointed.
The decision was made by the Board of Directors of la Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, upon the recommendation of Director David Chipperfield.
The International Jury is composed as follows:
Wiel Arets (Netherlands), architect, architectural theorist, urbanist, industrial designer and Professor of Building Planning and Design at the Berlin University of the Arts, UdK;
Kristin Feireiss (Germany), journalist, curator, director of the NAi - Netherlands Architecture Institute from 1996 to 2001 and founder of the Architecture Forum Aedes, Berlin;
Robert A.M. Stern (USA), architect and Dean of the Yale University School of Architecture;
Benedetta Tagliabue (Italy), architect, co-founder with Eric Miralles of Miralles Tagliabue EMBT;
Alan Yentob (Great Britain), Creative Director of the BBC and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).
The President of the Jury will be nominated by its members at the first meeting.
The International Jury will attribute the following prizes:
Golden Lion for best National Participation;
Golden Lion for best project in the International Exhibition Common Ground;
Silver Lion for a promising young architect in the International Exhibition Common Ground.
The awards ceremony will take place during the official opening of the Exhibition, Wednesday August 29, 2012 – at 11 am at the Giardini of la Biennale.The exhibition will be open to the public from 10 am.
Biographical notes
Wiel Arets (1955) is a Dutch architect, theorist, urbanist, industrial designer and Professor of Building Planning and Design at the Berlin University of the Arts, UdK. He studied at the Technical University of Eindhoven, graduating in 1983, founded Wiel Arets Architects in the same year. From 1995-2002 he was the Dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, where he introduced the idea of 'progressive-research' and co-founded the school's architectural journalHUNCH.
Kristin Feireiss (Berlin, Germany 1942) is a journalist, curator, and founder of the Architecture Forum Aedes (Berlin) together with her partner Hans-Jürgen Commerell. Feireiss plays an important role in deepening debates on architecture and urban development in Germany, and thereby exerts a lasting influence on the awareness of the cultural and economic significance of this art form around the world. As director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) from 1996 to 2001, she called greater attention to the transformative processes which have affected European and non-European cities beginning in 1989, and has carried out groundbreaking research in this area. She has received the German Bundesverdienstkreuz am Band (Cross of the Order of Merit, 2001) and the Wolfert van Borsel Medal in the Netherlands (2002). She has edited numerous monographs and thematic volumes in the international architectural context and has been active as a juror in many international competitions, including Beijing (2008), Master Plan for the Olympic Games (2002) and the Mariinsky Opera, St. Petersburg (2003). Since 2007 she was appointed as a member of the European Cultural Parliament.
Robert A.M. Stern (1939), Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, is a practicing architect, teacher, and writer. Stern was the 2011 Driehaus Prize laureate and in 2008 received the tenth Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum. In 2007, he received the Athena Award from the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Board of Directors' Honor from the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art. Stern has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad on both historical and contemporary topics in architecture. He was among the architects selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1976, 1980, and 1996.
Benedetta Tagliabue (Milan, Italy 1963) is an Italian architect, who lives and works in Barcelona. Graduate of the University of Venice (IUAV) in 1989, in 1991 she joined Enric Miralles’ studio where she subsequently became a partner. Recently she received the RIBA’s International Fellowships for her particular contribution as a non-UK architect she has made to architecture (2009) and an Honorary Doctor of Arts degree from Napier University (2004). In 2012 she has taught at Graduate School of Design Harvard University besides being a lecturer nearly once a month in architectural forums all over the world.
Alan Yentob (1947) is the Creative Director of the BBC and editor and presenter of the award-winning Imagine programme. He joined the BBC as a trainee in 1968, taking his first job in the World Service. In 1985, Yentob became Head of Music and Arts and subsequently Controller of BBC Two and of BBC One. He became Director of Programmes in 1997 and has been the BBC’s Creative Director since 2004. Yentob is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and was a founding member of the Architecture Foundation, alongside Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. He is also Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art and of the British Film Institute. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Leeds and De Montfort University.
Saturday 11 August 2012
The Filigree Maker
Curator: Perparim Rama
Advisor to the Commissioner: Winy Maas
Evaluation Board: Eliza Hoxha, Teuta Jashari Kajtazi, Valdet Osmani
Scientific Board: Sali Spahiu, Astrit Hajrullahu, Ilir Murseli, Nol Binakaj
Assistants: Fitim Mucaj, Agron Mjekiqi, David Beer, Miguel Fonseca, Desariot Ademaj, Valon Jashari, Besjan Krasniqi, Alush Gashi, Alban Gagica, Vjollca Podvorica, Nikki Murseli, Hana Nixha, D-LineScientific Board: Sali Spahiu, Astrit Hajrullahu, Ilir Murseli, Nol Binakaj
Venue: Arsenale
Kosovan architecture will make its debut at the Venice Biennale. Kosovo is now one of the 55 nations that have a presence in the largest and most prestigious architectural event in the world.
Perparim Rama, an architect and the founder/director of the London-based firm 4M, has been selected by Kosovo’s Ministry of Culture to curate the pavilion in Venice. The exhibition will run from August 29th through November 25th 2012.
The country’s exhibit, The Filigree Maker, intends to present an emotional barometer related to Kosovan streets and buildings. The idea is to expose Kosovo’s present architectural state while generating future design based on emotional responses.
For the pavilion, Rama aims at making the event interactive, using mostly web-based and social networking technologies through email, and networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Biennale attendees, as well as anyone who has Internet access, will be able to participate by way of selecting architectural and urban landscape images from the country and linking them directly to a sentiment: happiness, sadness, entrapment, excitement, freedom, or anger. Visitors will be able to select an image from a pre-selected library, or they may choose photographs that have been uploaded by other participants. They will also be able to simply add their own photos and link them to an emotion. People from all over the world will have an opportunity to express their own emotional attachment through these photographs and share their vision for the future in terms of the country’s design landscape.
All user-selected images will take a journey through an interactive-based platform, a journey which will lead to the formation of a common ground symbolized through a structure made of filigree wire. Filigree, known as filigrani in Kosovo, is one of the country's oldest traditional jewelry and metal making techniques. The use of filigree is one of the key structures representing Kosovo in this year's pavilion.
The Biennale will hopefully raise the new country's profile in the international arena of art and architecture; while this industry is making strides in Kosovo, it is still lagging behind due to a building boom which has covered the city with a sprawl of store fronts and apartment and office buildings. With that in mind, voters and visitors to the exhibit can become agents of change, impacting the structure represented in the Kosovan Pavilion and possibly affecting future legislation. As expressed by Rama, “This exhibit intends to create guides for current structure, creative design and future innovation.”
We kindly ask you to visit the following site and link the images of architecture and urban landscapes to the six emotions mentioned above.
Common Ground
by David ChipperfieldThe emphasis of the 2012 Biennale is on what we have in common. Above all, the ambition of Common Ground is to reassert the existence of an architectural culture, made up not just of singular talents but a rich continuity of diverse ideas united in a common history, common ambitions, common predicaments and ideals.
In architecture everything begins with the ground. It is our physical datum, where we make the first mark, digging the foundations that will support our shelter. On the ground we draw the line that defines the boundary of what is enclosed and what is common. Today our relationship to the ground is no longer so direct, but it remains critical to our understanding of our place and where we stand.
The physical process of enclosure not only protects but also defines inside from outside, private from public, the individual from the community. As the world seems to increasingly indulge the aspirations of the individual, we seem to find the idea of community, the civic, the public, the common, more difficult to define.
We still long for the things in a city that suggest collective identity: great institutions, a downtown, piazzas and places of public theatre. Our cities can be interpreted as the physical form of a dynamic struggle between the individual and the collective. The radical visions proposed and realised by the modern movement never replaced the conventional images we use to represent our idea of public and private: the street, the square, the arcade, the boulevard.
Our contemporary, ambiguous public realm of consumption, travel and leisure, is shaped by criteria that tend to contradict the impossible but irresistible idea of a formally expressed, meaningful societal order.
The territory of architecture has been reduced in many cases to conforming to regulations, maximising size and density on a given site, and achieving some vague sense of compatibility with the context.
Against this background we try to maintain ideas about the public realm, but they manifest themselves most frequently in choreographed retail opportunities for office workers or leisure shoppers. In this inevitable and never ending struggle to give identity to spaces that conform to ever more subtle shades of grey between private and public, the tools and words we use can seem crude and ungainly.
Common ground (as opposed to public space) infers a territory that is shared within a context of difference. The theme identifies the search for the shared within the apparently diverse, and helps us to imagine strategies to deal with our common predicament and our strangely persistent need to feel part of a world bigger than the one required for our individual comfort.
Common Ground of course also refers to the ideas that we share about architecture, within and beyond our own professional boundaries. The title invites us to consider how these shared perceptions, concerns and expectations may be better directed.
Architecture requires collaboration. It is difficult to think of a peaceful activity that draws upon so many diverse contributions and expectations. It involves commercial forces and social vision, and it must deal with the wishes of institutions and corporations and the needs and desires of individuals. Whether we articulate it or not, every major construction is an amazing testament to man’s ability to join forces and make something on behalf of others. The fact that this effort is so often regarded as negative rather than amazing is a communication failure on our part.
The role of the architect is at best one of critical compliance. Architects can only operate through the mechanisms that commission them and which regulate their efforts. Our ideas are dependent on and validated by the reaction of society. This relationship is not only practical but concerns the very meaning of our work. In the increasingly complex confrontation between the commercial motivations of development and our persistent desire for a humane environment there seems to be little dialogue. If architecture is to be more than the privileged, exceptional moments of our built world, we must find a more engaged collaboration of talents and resources.
Good architecture gives examples and inspires us. It doesn't happen naturally: it requires a conspiracy of circumstances and participants. While architects can provide ideas, the relevance and importance of these ideas depends on an engagement with society. The tendency to define the role of the architect as either an antagonist or a service provider only reinforces the problem and sabotages the potential of architecture itself.
Architecture has always been an act of resistance, resistance to the elements and the forces of chaos. Architecture offers refuge and can create a world within a world, giving order and meaning through the significance of its efforts. Surely it is the commonality of these efforts that rewards us all?
Within the context of the Architecture Biennale, ‘Common Ground’ evokes the image not only of shared space and shared ideas but of a rich ground of history, experience, image and language. Layers of explicit and subliminal material form our memories and shape our judgements. While we struggle to orient ourselves in a continuously changing world, what we are familiar with is an inevitable part of our ability to understand our place. It is critical that our expectations and our history don’t become a justification for sentimentality or resistance to progress. We must therefore articulate better our evaluations and prejudices if we are not to regard what has come before as something to escape and if we are to give value to a cumulative and evolving architectural culture rather than a random flow of meaningless images and forms.
The theme of ‘Common Ground’ allows us to engage with these themes, provoking us to think about the physical expression of our collective aspirations and ideas of society. It reminds us of our shared history and encourages us to think about the collaborative nature of architecture and the extraordinary potential of its collective process.
I am grateful to the participants who have so eagerly engaged in this demonstration of the shared, the common and taken time to engage in dialogue and present their ideas.
Introduction by the President of la Biennale di Venezia, Paolo Baratta
No other discipline like architecture lends itself and begs to be observed, studied and considered from various points of view. The International Architecture Exhibitions of the Biennale have charted it in the recent years: architecture as a reference point for city planning, the phenomenon of big cities, regional organization, the new need for projects that make the spaces we live in recognizable and give them signs of individual and collective identity… The many Biennale exhibitions of the past have alternated curators from the world of scholars and critics with curators who are architects themselves. Many architecture exhibitions have addressed architecture and environmental issues, architecture and social issues, architecture and technology, and each exhibition raises the question of the “point of view” from which we observe.
The Biennale has given growing importance to the Architecture Exhibition which is still young considering that the first Exhibition was held in 1975 and that the first edition that occupied the totality of the new spaces acquired by the Biennale at the Arsenale was held in 2000.
For this 13th Biennale we met David Chipperfield, well aware that he cultivates a very intense vision of architecture as practice. We felt it was important to look at architecture with a focus deep inside the discipline itself, to highlight the rich pattern of connections and associations, the intense dialogue between the architects of present and past generations, and their points of reference. This moment will be useful to reflect upon and represent architecture by concentrating our attention on it, in response to other visions that consider it almost as a brunch of other disciplines.
We believe architecture to be the art of organizing the space we share, and the expression “Common Ground” refers directly to this concept. Architecture is the tool for realizing the res publica, which is the place of individuals but belongs to everyone, it is the Artemis that metamorphoses private ownerships and desires into a public goods.
The present times and the events that have affected the world economy in recent years would also advise some reconsideration and reevaluation. We need only mention the interruption of many of the colossal projects announced in recent years, and architecture’s loss of momentum as an instrument that relies on technology to emphasize mainly the victories and achievements of the client. Perhaps the time has passed when architects were hired as demiurges for merely representative purposes, in contrast to civil and urban contexts and conditions that, in the meantime, were developing in contradictory directions.
In my conversations with David, I thought I detected a concern: a desire to recompose the identity of the architect in the face of the partially distorted use that has been made of his art, often with his complicity, and of the equally widespread mediocre and utilitarian use of non-architecture, not to speak of the squalid environments built in cities around much of our world.
To speak of architecture and its complexity, of its richness, of the questions it seeks to answer, can be useful to everyone,first and foremost because it may enhance a more qualified culture on the part of the clients, lacking which we are in danger of losing the meaning of things, of history and of real needs.
David Chipperfield will present an Exhibition with 66 projects by architects, photographers, artists, critics and scholars. Many of them responded to his invitation with original project and installations expressly created for this Biennale, involving in their projects other colleagues with whom they share a Common Ground. The participants are 118 overall.
Let me add that 55 Countries will be participating in this Biennale including 4 new entries: Angola, Republic of Kosovo, Kuwait, and Peru.
For the third year in a row we are presenting an initiative which we consider to be of the greatest importance. A Biennale lasts three months, and we know that a high percentage of visitors belongs to the world of architecture in one way or another; many of them are young. We would like to be the preferred destination for visits organized by universities, lasting 3 consecutive days and culminating in a study seminar. Basically we would like the visit to become part of the students’ curricular activities: this is the goal that we pursue in the program entitled Biennale Sessions. It is an ambitious project, but the Biennale di Venezia wishes to remain a center for research, in which to observe, develop thoughts and elaborate, and a further step in the educational process of the new generations. 53 universities have already signed up for Biennale Sessions, and we have not yet come to the end of the school year.
During the exhibition, the Biennale will organize a program of Conversations about the Architecture, meetings dedicated to specific themes, issues and architects, to be held during the months of October and November.
My thanks to the Ministry of Culture, which at a difficult time for public finances is maintaining its decisive support, the local institutions that in various ways support La Biennale, the City of Venice and the Regione del Veneto. I extend out thanks to the authorities that are in various ways involved and concerned with the buildings in which we hold our Exhibition, from the Ministry of Defence to the Venice Soprintendenze.
I would like to thank also David Chipperfield’s team and the Biennale staff that will make possible the realization of the Exhibition.
With the help of friends throughout the world KAF together with PAUS-publishing in 2013 will be organizing the Prishtina Architecture Week the first event of its kind in Kosovo.
If you are someone that would like to contribute to this event and make the most out of it feel free to contact us by mail. Add your mail so you can stay updated in the upcoming months.
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